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It's no wonder that farmers with fields in the plains surrounding Stonehenge, in southern England, face late-summer mornings with dread. On any given day at the height of the growing season, as many as a dozen farmers are likely to find a field marred by a circle of flattened grain.

This close-up of a crop circle near Avebury, England, shows how the grain has been flattened to create the pattern.
Courtesy of G.S. Hawkins

Plagued by some enigmatic nocturnal pest, the farmers must contend not only with damage to their crops but also with the intrusions of excitable journalists, gullible tourists, befuddled scientists, and indefatigable investigators of the phenomenon.

Indeed, the study of these mysterious crop circles has itself grown into a thriving cottage industry of sightings, measurements, speculations, and publications. Serious enthusiasts call themselves cereologists, after Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture.

Most crop deformations appear as simple, nearly perfect circles of grain flattened in a spiral pattern. But a significant number consist of circles in groups, circles inside rings, or circles with spurs and other appendages. Within these geometric forms, the grain itself may be laid down in various patterns.

Explanations of the phenomenon range from the bizarre and the unnatural to the merely fantastic. To some people, the circles—which began appearing nearly 3 decades ago—represent the handiwork of extraterrestrial visitors. Others attribute the formations to crafty tradesmen bent on mischief after an evening at the pub, pranksters commemorating a recent movie, or even hordes of graduate students driven by a mad professor. To a few, the circles suggest the action of numerate whirlwinds, microwave-generated ball lightning, or some other peculiar atmospheric phenomenon.

These scenarios apparently suffered a severe blow in 1991, when two elderly landscape painters, David Chorley and Douglas Bower, admitted to creating many of the giant, circular wheat-field patterns that had cropped up during the previous decade in southern England. The chuckling hoaxers proudly displayed the wooden planks, ball of string, and primitive sighting device they claimed they had used to construct the circles......

Images and full article at the link

Rare video of Gerald Hawkins lecturing on his crop circle theories

He was more famous for his amazing book on Stonehenge called 'Stonehenge Decode'
In which he claimed the 56 Aubrey holes which circle Stonehenge could be used to predict lunar eclipses a result which is strongly debatedhttp://www.amazon.co.uk/Stonehenge-D.../dp/0880291478

But the ancients of Europe were fascinated by lunar and solar cycles; amazing Golden Hats attest to this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_hat
It's been suggested they may also have been used to calculate eclipses

I remember someone filming one being made. Small balls of light bigger then a basketball would fly about and as they past over, the grass/wheat would slowly bend down, like gently. The light would sometimes disappear under the surface of the tops of the wheat, then they collected into one area and rose upwards, accellerating. A policeman showed up when it was being filmed and yelled at the filmers to leave, and a black (or something) helicopter showed up as well, as though they found out about it through other sources. (Radar?) That was wild. You can find that on YouTube. I am sure we have all seen that one.

This is my fave. This is pretty wild.

The message disc that came with it, font in a spiral, is something done back in ancient times, perhaps Babylon era, writing from either an outer edge inwards to a core, or vice versa. If doing it from the outside, you would first need to calculate the length of the message or you run out of space or you are left with excess space (in the spiral). The message is pretty wild....